LA Schools to Layoff

It looks like bad news is coming to the Los Angeles Unified School District and it just might cut back on the number of educators who are currently working for them. The school district has to make some serious cuts to the budget, which will come out in the next couple of weeks. The notices are expected to come after the official budget layout is announced in the next couple of days. This plan will be based on a final budget number that was approved back in the middle of Feburary. That amount means that several workers are going to be let go in order to meet this number.

You may be wondering how many workers will be let go. At the current moment we don’t have a final number, but we do know that a significant number of employees, 11,700, will be given layoff notices once the budget is line itemed, according to estimates. How many of those workers will be teachers, and how many of them will actually be let go once the notices are issued is, at the present moment unknown.

Of course, this is not the only California school district that is having problems with its budget. The San Diego school district has also made some serious cuts to staff in order to make ends meet. For those of you who missed out on our earlier coverage here is an excerpt:

“It looks like despite taking some serious steps to try and right its budget the school board of trustees for the San Diego Unified School District is going to have to get ready to layoff a large number of its teachers.

This week layoff notices went out to just about 1,700 workers for the school district, and this time all of them were teachers or in-class support staff. While the union is fighting the idea of layoffs tooth and nail, and calling for the school board to make just about any other cuts first, the layoff number will likely go down before the actual cuts come. Not because of the protests of the union but because the school district sent out a series of worst-case layoff notices.

You see the school will not receive its final budget numbers for the next school year until about the middle of this year. That means that the schools are guessing on how much money they will have when the budget is actually issued. Since the layoff notices have to go out by the 15^th of March, in order to abide by both state law and contracts currently in place with the union, the school is giving everyone who might be laid off a notice and then hoping that when all things come to an end they will not have to cut that many teachers. The school took a similar approach to the uncertainty of their budget last year and  the majority of those pink slips were not put into effect when the budget came through. This year however the school expects to face a serious shortfall.”